TTRPGs: broken mechanics vs. abusive players

[Lanefan]

It's never worth it. You should always design for the general and worry about exceptions later (or not at all).

I'm in between on this: design for the general, yes, but at the same time keep an eye out for the more obvious what-ifs and sort them out at the design level where possible. This principle holds true both for game-rules design and adventure writing.

As posted earlier in the thread, if there's a rule that breask the game then the best reaction is to have the mature discussion, 'This rule breaks things, let's all agree to not use it."

On the odd occasion where mature discussion doesn't work then congrats you've just identified one or more obnoxious players. The next step is to consider whether or not you want to continue this gaming with them (maybe change to a different game, maybe kick them, maybe leave, lots of options here).

For example, I am not using forcecage as a box again in 5E. Why? Because it just plain sucks for a player to spend the next 10 turns doing nothing. We've all agreed that my players won't do it to a single foe either, because it sucks for me to spend the next 10 turns doing nothing. If there are multiple foes then they will happily use forcecage (or banishment or similar) to take out one foe while fighting the rest.

This "gentlemen's agreement" is exactly the sort of metagame thinking that drives me nuts.

Either rules-fix the spell so it works like you and your table really want it to or accept the fact that both you and your players can (and IMO should, in-character) use it to whatever best effects present themselves at the time.

The mature discussion should start with "This rule breaks things, how can we fix it so it no longer breaks things?", and go from there. (personally, were I the DM in this example I'd start one step further back and ask "Does sitting out for ten turns break the game for you?", and if I got any "yes" answers some big red flags would go up; as IMO and IME not being involved for a while now and then is a hard-wired fact of RPG play)

And if it turns out the rule can't be fixed then maybe the nuclear option is to - in this example - drop the spell completely.

 

[bloodtide]

This "gentlemen's agreement" is exactly the sort of metagame thinking that drives me nuts.

I've never ben able to use the "gentlemen's agreement" . I have never been able to come to such an "agreement". So I just don't use it.

Though around half my games are only with good players that I at least agree with, if not are friends with, so it's not needed.

The mature discussion should start with "This rule breaks things, how can we fix it so it no longer breaks things?", and go from there. (personally, were I the DM in this example I'd start one step further back and ask "Does sitting out for ten turns break the game for you?", and if I got any "yes" answers some big red flags would go up; as IMO and IME not being involved for a while now and then is a hard-wired fact of RPG play)

And if it turns out the rule can't be fixed then maybe the nuclear option is to - in this example - drop the spell completely.

I love rule fixes. A lot of my house rules do this, and more so are designed to stop problem players cold.

 

[aramis erak]

I know right?

I went through something like this with my players a while ago. They considered anything that wasn't worth carrying to be scenery or set-dressing, not really treasure...and what was and wasn't considered "not worth carrying" varied greatly. Copper pieces, for example, were frequently mentioned as not being worth the effort to haul out of the dungeon. One player in particular would get unreasonably angry about it, to the point of rage-quitting one gaming session and sending me angry emails for a week.

Not kidding.

Gygax took a late medieval historical price list in shillings to be his gold piece value. One book I know he checked out (noted in the old due date card) is almost identical to the D&D OE price list. (what isn't is rounding the second significant digit to nearest multiple of 5.) that book also noted that some times and places, a gold penny was minted, and notionally valued at a shilling... so a gold penny worth a shilling, and you get the transformation of medieval debased silver into notional gp... truth is, D&D prices for most everything but magic should drop a factor of 20

A penny weighs 2.5 grams, so 10,000 of them is worth $100 and weighs 25kg--about 55 pounds. So if cp = pennies and gp = $, copper coins are worth 0.55gp per pound. My players considered this to be unworthy of effort, and would leave it behind. (And that one player in partuclar would take it further, accusing me of "robbing" them of treasure by giving out trash. "We've told you over and over again, we're not gonna haul that (expletive) around! So just forget it! Every time you say 100 copper, I'm going to write down 1 gold!"

Never mind the fact that they would loot every single weapon, shield, and fragment of armor that they found.

My solution to this is they get, usually, midway between ore and bar stock price for captured metal weapons...
Which puts them a couple coins down the AD&D/3E/4E/5E

So I kinda stopped listening to their complaining from that point on. It was pretty clear that the problem wasn't the copper coins--the problem was they knew other, more valuable coins existed in the game, and they were trying to press me into using them instead. They genuinely felt that if I didn't convert everything into gems or platinum, I was somehow punishing them for dumping their Strength scores.

In the end, they got their wish: no more copper or silver coins. Instead, I converted all non-platinum coins that the monsters were carrying into an equivalent value of (much heavier) mundane armor and weapons. The encounter key says there are 100sp in that chest? Not anymore, now there's a shield. To this day they still think they won that fight, and I've never corrected them.

its stories like this that send me to the closer to sane £sd money used in Pendragon, WFRP, and a few others... when a penny or two is dining out inn style....

 

[Darth Solo]

I get fairly annoyed when I see someone call xyz game or aspect of that game “broken,” especially when talking about major releases that have been tested to the nth degree. It does however pique my curiosity about what is a genuinely broken mechanic vs. absurd and unlikely circumstances fomented by bad faith/abusive game play.

Just an example for the purpose of this discussion: What I’ve seen D&D shorts post to his YouTube channel comes to mind (yep, he actually talks about the game). I haven’t seen all of his videos but the ones I have watched all hash out some astronomically improbable combinations of variables, cherry picked one out of context feature at a time throughout multiple disparate supplements, coupled with some extraordinarily bad faith interpretations of the D&D 5th Edition rules. He’s not the only player who does this by any stretch of the imagination, but his abuses are definitely some of the most outrageous I’ve ever seen.

However, for another example on the other side of that coin, there were a couple books in late pf1e that, when used as intended, pretty much broke the game. So I am just ruminating on where the actual line is. Of course, it’s probably not easily defined, if it can be defined at all. But it deserves some thought I believe. Then there’s the glorious, beautiful mess that is the Palladium megaverse. I don’t know that I want to call anything in that system “broken” per se, but it definitely is cookoo.

Please share your thoughts on where genuinely broken game mechanics end and player abuse begins.

A broken rule is the one that isn't fun at the table which means it usually gets tossed or changed. I mean look at the D&D spell Wish: it's sooooo broken BUT it's fun so why not? The Time Travel power in superhero games is totally broken for so many in & out of game reasons BUT it's fun so why not?

I used to think spellcasters were broken until I played one and realized how much fun it is to Sleep and Fireball everything in sight. There used to be an old D&D rule for Fighters that allowed them to make multiple attacks against 0-1 HD NPCs and monsters but I guess the designers thought it was broken and trashed it BUT in the process they nerfed Fighters in a major way.

And is it really abuse when the rule is right there in the book? I've had players want to fight me because my evil NPCs use Persuasion, Deception and Intimidation as deadly weapons that completely neutralize their characters. But --- it's in the book and that's how it works LOL The cool part is when players finally realize that social skills can be more fun that using spells and longswords.

As long as we're having fun that's all that matters.